Coronavirus: Why online marketing is more important than ever for businesses

With the outbreak of the COVID 19 pandemic, businesses have begun to witness a behavioural shift among consumers and even suppliers. Not only are people afraid to go to work,but consumers are also afraid to go into stores, restaurants, and other public places where they might spend money.

With consumers staying indoors and avoiding human contact as much as possible,it’s easy to see how businesses would need to embrace e-business and online marketing as the best survival strategy against the coronavirus.

While you may be tempted toidle away while waiting for these terrible times to abate, this is also a good time to start building up your business online to gain fast rankings organically. If you don’t know much about this whole online business, you can start on starpage.ca.

Before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, many industries had been surprisingly slow in switching to digital marketing as a means of business advancement. While most of these businesses understand the importance of advertising and marketing to business growth, they had just been reluctant to try out marketing through e-channels. Many must have thought that they had more effective means of marketing asides the internet.

The on-going pandemic has taught everyone a very valued lesson — every business, no matter their preferred methods, must establish an online presence, if for nothing else than as a safeguard from natural disasters.

An article on Medium, puts it more succinctly, “the digital economy would be THE economy going forward. It’s THE ONLY WAY to develop the next generation of an economy that’s resilient and safeguarded from natural disasters.”

According to studies cited on Medium, since the recent Coronavirus outbreak, 94 percent of the FORTUNE 1000 has started to experience some sort of disruption.

Everyone has turned to the internet for answers. Recent research published on comscore.com, reveals that consumers visited websites and apps 61% more times in 2020 than they did in the whole of last year

It is safe to say that in times of extreme natural disasters such as the one that currently overwhelms the world, there is nowhere else for businesses to turn, asides embracing consistent digital marketing and trying to make sales through the internet. By the time the pandemic is over, they would have succeeded in not only boosting business activities but gaining fast rankings online.

What to do now

If you are a business who’s never taken your online presence seriously until this time, Business2community.com suggests ways to keep your business up and running until the end of this lockdown period.

You’ll need to do a lot of video conferencing in the coming months, so get Zoom or Go To Meeting as these are great video conferencing tools.

You’ll also be doing a lot of chatting with your team, so download Get Gchat or slackso that you can communicate with groups in real-time.

Project management systems are extremely important when working remotely, some great recommendations areBasecamp, Asana, Wrike, Trellow, Jira or Monday

Use Dropbox or Drive for all your file storage

Most importantly, you must build a strong digital marketing cost per acquisition and marketing model. This is critical seeing as almost all your consumers are home and online now.

Ultimately

Yes, our world has been shakenby the spread of the coronavirus, however, there is light at the end of this seemingly endless tunnel.Take a look at China where the outbreak was first reported, the coronavirus has now largely been contained there, with lockdowns lifted and employees returning to work. This brings hope to every city currently battling the virus. It will one day come to an end. But before that time comes, you must find a way to remain in business by exploring your digital options.